Pigpen plays piano on Truckin', Ripple & New Speedway. Jerry switches to electric guitar on New Speedway. David Nelson plays mandolin on Rosalie McFall, Cold Jordan & Swing Low. Marmaduke adds bass vocals to Cold Jordan and Swing Low.

The introduction goes: "Good evening and welcome to the Fillmore West. Tonight you're going to spend an evening with the Grateful Dead."

Ripple AND New Speedway Boogie in one show?
Heaven.

Historic...American...Beauty

Hey Seth,
Not sure you'll ever see this but my guess for the piano player would be either Howard Wales or Ned Lagin. Both had minor involvement on American Beauty and this show happened during the sessions for that album. Wally Heider Studios on Hyde Street was just a few blocks away from the Fillmore West. Easy for session players to come along for the gig.

Anyone know who's on piano in the acoustic set? I'd be surprised if it was Pigpen.

...four debuts!!!

The acoustic set is a real peach.

Look, just listen to the first-ever performances of Ripple and Brokedown Palace if that's all you need. They are beautiful, and the tape is good enough to immerse yourself in for those several minutes.

There is very likely NO sbd of this show. Bear started his jail term in July of 1970 (following his "going away party" show in San Raf). No one took over that responsibility for some months, and the SBD tapes we do have were all made ad hoc, by random crew members or locals at the venues. So this tape is almost certainly all we have, and it's a blessing to have it, in my opinion.

Now, is it a "good tape"? No.

Is it terrible? No, not during the acoustic set at least. It's poor but listenable.

I'm not going to listen to the electric stuff on a tape like this, personally...there's enough else out there that's similar that I don't feel the need to.

But, ahem, the DEBUT of RIPPLE and BROKEDOWN PALACE - paired with each other, like on the album - COME ON NOW BROTHERS AND SISTERS, this is a serious, beautiful, magical moment and we're lucky to have any window on it at all.

Thanks for pasting in the RS article - “music soothing to weary hearts and hard-driven minds because it understands that state of mind only too well" - just so, just so

Five stars because anything less for a listenable tape of those two debuts seems totally insane to me. Peace y'all!

wow what a show to have been at, the first time so many old friends came out to say hi, the poor quality recording is actually pretty good for the time, especially when they had to be stealthy. give it a listen, after a little while your ears adjust, we are just spoiled today. still, if anyone has any other recording of this show, please upload it, even if its bits and pieces, i hope a sbd makes an appearance of this show.
ya cant give this show enough stars

freakin' awesome! what else can u say? classic. what i would give to have been there

Excellent to hear this show and so many first-time songs. Scroll down in comments to read Rolling Stone's review of this. The songs were so new the reviewer thought Truckin' was called Juggin'.

Ripple -> Brokedown Palace!!! Beautiful... fantastic acoustic set. The electric set is great too. sweet 'Thats It For The Other One'.

If there were ever any invaluable audience tapes, they would be from 1970. You will miss out if you don't hear shows like 6/24 and 11/8/70 and this one on a stereo, particularly DS from 11/8.
I love the acoustic set and the Cryptical>Other One is great.

Got a poster with this run on it on my wall and it's a sweet poster advertising a great concert with a nice acoustic set featuring some firsts. Even though their first performances they seem to have these excellent songs down fairly well. Though the sound quality is not top par as soon as your a minute or two into the concert you don't even notice, especially when their playing Ripple for the first time. This is why I love the archive.

The reason why I maintain my stance of the previous statement is because I was an attendee of this and all three nights.

Now, as I have previously stated in other reviews, this show and the next night were rather anticlimactic for me owing to the tremendous version of Casey Jones that opened the first electric set of the show on the 17th. None the less, I think overall that this show was better than the 17th and the 19th was better than this one.

This is not a terrible AUD but it would be nice to hear a SBD of this night. C'est la vie!

Btw, this run of shows was performed at the former Carousel Ballroom - a famous old nightspot for San Franciscans since the 30's. It was located at Van Ness and Market and situated upstairs above an auto dealership. Graham renamed it Fillmore West in the summer of 1968 when BGP wrested the management of the venerable dancehall from the Dead-Airplane-Quicksilver triumverate and moved operations from the Fillmore Auditorium. He told me that the reason he moved was because the Fillmore neighborhood had become too scary due to the social-political-racial tensions that dominated all of San Fran in the late 60's.

Superb! Love the RS review. Dead on!

The sound is really not that bad. The acoustic set is fantastic. The electric set is very unfantastic.

Although Deadbase lists this show where songs RIPPLE, BROKEDOWN PALACE, OPERATOR & TRUCKIN made their debut, chances are one or more of these songs were played on the night before. No recording exists of 8/17/70 Fillmore West so we can't tell for sure.

40 years to the day later..
My very first of over 400 Grateful Dead shows.
The sound quality is poor. Don't the Dead have a board of this show?
There are boards of earlier shows.
It was the day before my 16th birthday. Yes tomorrow is my 56th birthday.
This show with a little help from Owsley changed my life forevermore.

Rating: A+ cause I was there!
Sound quality: D

historic show with so many firsts popping up here, great stuff to hear, sound quality really isnt bad at all, dont know why everyones complaining...would you rather not hear this at all?!

that said this show is excellent both acoustic and electric, great stuff played on the acoustic truly great
and the electric is just so so good, such a good sound coming from them, jerrys guitar is amazing, the dancing was stunning, the other one was awesome, how often would they go into sugar right after that! attics is great to hear such a smooth song, mans world was fantastic out of this world, and the close out was sweet...dancing was def highlight, then mans world and other one

Considering what was available to record with back in 1970, this is fairly decent quality. It is also a delight to hear what the boys sounded like from the audience's perspective. I swear, you can hear a sheep or a goat bleating before and after Friend of the Devil.

i was not even 6 months old when they played this show! :D

im an 80's deadhead and have loved them ever since. i first saw them play in 87!

i love all these old recordings they are very special to hear and enjoy.

Don't be swayed by the reviewers that are complaining about the sound quality. This is a very listenable recording from a crucial period where sbd's aren't available anyway. As for the show itself...look at the set list for cying out loud. Kids today!

When you've downloaded all the other stuff, and there's nothing else, you wind up here in the audience recordings...

Some filled with uncontrolled hand clappin' some not, this one is quite devoid of the hand clappin' you'd expect.

The whole vibe of the audience sound is there and it is what it is. Don't judge the sound, listen to THE GRATEFUL DEAD. There is hand clappin' and its doesn't detract from the music.

Oh, and the boy's knock yer socks off at this show...what did you expect man?

At the end of Uncle John's Band Jerry says goodnight, right after that you hear a guy nearby in the audience scream "NO" like the plug was being pulled on his life support system and then the tape ends abruptly...What a show...

Eat, drink be merry and listen to THE GRATEFUL DEAD.

4 star audience tape, 5 star performance

Thanks for the love.

An Evening with the Grateful Dead

Jerry and co. mellow out, grow up


We change and our changings change, a friend said once. It sounded true, but it seems too that through it all we stay the same. That obscure rumination takes us to, of all places, backstage at the Fillmore West, a spot that has mutely witnessed its share of changes and has gone through some of its own. Backstage used to be literally that, a few murky closets with just a few inches and a thin wall separating them from the amps. Now the car dealer on the corner has gone through his changes, and Bill Graham got extra floorspace for a dressing room as big as the lobby of a grand hotel.

No palms but a lot of sofas, on one of which sat Jerry Garcia as if he owned the place. Which he once had, sort of, when it was the Carousel, changed from an Irish dance hall to a mad den of psychedelic thieves who for a few months put on a series of dances the likes of which hadn't been seen since the early days of the old Fillmore.

Jerry Garcia had played over there too -- he had been a foundering member, so to speak -- but he had never owned it. Bill Graham had owned that Fillmore and now he owned this one and Jerry was working for him one more night. There was a time when Bill Graham was always on hand when the Dead were playing, but this night he was in New York on business (the next night in LA), and a second or third generation of underling, a soft-faced young man named Jerry Pompili was watching the clock and counting the heads on behalf of Fillmore Inc.

It was just past eight-thirty, showtime, and Jerry P. approached Garcia and asked if they were ready to go on.

Jerry G. was deep in one of his eyeball-to-glittering eyeball monologues, but he paused long enough for a glance around that indicated he was the only musician present and accounted for. "The other guys will be here in a minute, man," he said, "Phil's the only one who might be late."

"Well," said Pompili, "what happens if Phil is late?" allowing into his voice a hint of his hope that the Dead would find a way to start without him, to be nice for once. A hopeless hope.

"Nothing happens," said Jerry G. grinning deep within his hairy tangle, "We'll start whenever Phil arrives."

"Okay," said Pompili, shrinking like a tired balloon, and Jerry geared back up to rapping speed, instantly oblivious of the interruption.

Everything had changed, and nothing too. After over five years of extra inning play, the celebrated Fillmore (and all of rock and roll show biz) versus Grateful Dead game was still a nothing-nothing tie. For five of those years the Dead took their lumps, always scraping through but never out of trouble. In the past half year, however, their tenacity has finally begun to pay off (perseverance furthers, says the Book of Changes). The years of weathering cosmic crises have given them an unshakable musical and group foundation (and even an odd sort of financial stability) and on that they are building afresh.

Typically, their luck waited until the last possible moment to change. 1969 ended with the near disaster of Altamont. The Dead family had been crucial in its organization, and they were as responsible as anyone for the sanctioned presence of the Hells Angels. That day -- they did not even get to play in the end and do their best to save it -- was, says Jerry, "a hard, hard lesson," and while they were absorbing it in early 1970, they had an epic management crisis. Their manager, whom they had chosen because of his honesty and earnestness, was irritating some family members who did not trust his ingratiating manner. Weeks of tense encounters led to a showdown and the manager was let go. Only then did the band discover that he had been bilking them all along; by that time he had disappeared and no one had the time or heart for a suit.

Then they got busted en masse in New Orleans (their second time, the first in the fall of '67 in San Francisco). That has now turned out to be just an inconvenience of time and money, but in March they didn't know that. In the middle of all of this they had to do a record. Something complex was out of the question; Jerry and his writing partner Ron Hunter had some tunes, so they walked into Pacific High Recorders in San Francisco, and banged it out in nine days.

The result was Workingman's Dead, one of the best of the few good records released this year, their simplest production since their first LP, and their most popular release so far. "It was something," said Jerry, "all this heavy bullshit was flying all around us, so we just retreated in there and made music. Only the studio was calm. The record was the only concrete thing happening, the rest was part of that insane legal and financial figment of everybody's imagination, so I guess it came out of a place that was real to all of us. It was good old solid work. TC (pianist Tom Constanten) had just left to go his own way, and with his classical influence gone, we got back to being a rock and roll band again, not an experimental music group. Man, we had been wanting to boogie for a long time."

Workingman's Dead is just about as good a record as a record can be. Easy on the ears from the first listening, it gets mellower as it grows on you; a lot of different rhythms but one sure pulse. In it they tap the same rich emotive vein that the band has reached, and have made from it story songs with down-home feel hiding sophisticated structures, but the Dead's molding of the material is a lot more raw and driving. The Dead look at the world from the outside edge, and their song heroes are losers and hardworking men. "A friend of the devil it a friend of mine," they sing at one point, and the closest they come to "I Shall Be Released" is:
One way or another,
One way or another,
One way or another,
This darkness got to end.

That's a long way from the messianic enthusiasm of "Golden Road to Unlimited Devotion" ("See that girl barrbonn' around, she's a dancin' and a singin' she is carryin' one"; remember?), but it's won them more friends. Sales haven't been at hit proportions, but enough to make Warner Brothers friendly for the first time since they were trying to sign the band up.

"Of course we still owe Warners money," Jerry said, "but we're getting the debt down to the size where it's more like a continual advance." A family member, John McIntire, is now the manager, some old friends are watching the books, and the days when organs got repossessed five minutes before showtime have receded, at least for the present.

"We're feeling good," Jerry went on, "really laid back, a tittle older and groovier, not traveling so much, staying at home and quieting down. We used to push ourselves and get crazy behind it, but now we're all getting more done but not having to work at it so hard.

No one could say when the turn from the old Grateful Dead to the new began, but the key was opening up the band's structure. The Dead's complex personal changes are as legendary as their public ones, and they ended only when they decided that they didn't have to be just the Grateful Dead. They could also be Bobby Ace and the Cards from the Bottom, a reentry group led by Bob Weir, or Mickey Hart and the Heartbeats which a lot of golden oldie rockers. At the same time (spring 1969) Jerry got a pedal steel to fool around with and ended up commuting dawn to Palo Alto twice a week to play Nashville style in a little club. That group became the New Riders of the Purple Sage and other Dead members sat in from time to time.

All that country music got them singing, something for which they had not been noteworthy in the pass, and hours of three-part harmony rehearsals got them back to acoustic instruments. Less noise made them less wired. The small quiet groups could and did do club work, around the Bay which meant gigs without touring or equipment hassles. All that ended up with the groove that made Workingman's Dead possible and has created a unique musical experience which they call, rather formally, An Evening with the Grateful Dead.

Phil arrived, sweeping in with madman-long strides, a few minutes before nine, and the latest evening began before a happy crowd of oldtime heads. They opened with the acoustic part (there's no other name). Jerry and Bob Weir on guitars, Pigpen on piano, Phil on electric bass, and Bill Kreutzman (who alternates with Mickey Hart) on drums. The first tune was "Juggin'," an easy going autobiography of a band's life on the road, dotted with busts and bad times and long gone friends like Annie who they've heard is "living on reds, Vitamin C, and cocaine, and all you can say is 'ain't it a shame.'" It went on like that for an hour, music soothing to weary hearts and hard-driven minds because it understands that state of mind only too well. Jerry and Bob shared lead guitar and vocals, Pig doodled around when he wanted and just sat there when he didn't, and Phil and Bill just kept the beat. David Nelson of the New Riders came in about half way through on mandolin, and Jerry switched to his Fender, and it was all very sweet and funky. They ended with "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," and believe it or not, the Grateful Dead looked angelic at last.

The New Riders came on after the break -- Jerry on pedal steel, Mickey on drums, David Nelson on electric guitar, Marmaduke lead vocal and acoustic, and Dave Torbert on bass. They opened with "Sly Days on the Road" and that too set the pace for a rolling set of country rock that probably sounded a lot like the Perkins Brothers when Carl was working honky tonks around Jackson, Tennessee. Except that Carl Perkins never had a drummer as tense as Mickey Hart, and while Jerry most often was tastefully traditional on the steel, he allowed himself some short freakouts banshee-style seldom heard below the Mason-Dixon. They ended with "Honky Tonk Women" which was a gas; Keith Richards, from a film clip in the light show, watched them without cracking a smile.

Then it was time for the Grateful Dead, and everyone was on their feet moving as they began as they used to begin with "Dancing in the Streets" ("It doesn't matter who you are, as long as you are there"). After that came the lovely "Mama Tried" that the Everly Brothers had on their Roots album, and then Pigpen took it away with an all-out dramatic rendition of "It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World." Out of that into "Not Fade Away" (quite a repertory that night, huh?) and it was past one thirty; Jerry Garcia was still going strong after four hours on three instruments but the Fillmore floor had gotten to me and we wandered out with that Bo-Diddley-by-way-of-Buddy-Holly beat pounding on and on and on ("My love is bigger than a Cadillac . . .") It wasn't one of those weird nights when, acid-blitzed, they gushed out music as hypnotic energy; is was more legible and, if not as spellbinding, more open music. Very fine indeed.

Those weird nights are surely not gone forever, but the Dead are a bit more careful these days. "Altamont showed us that we don't want to lead people up that road anymore," Jerry had said before the show, "taught us to be more cautious, to realize and respect the boundaries of our power and our space." The Dead never called themselves leaders, but they were high-energy promoters of the psychedelic revolution. On one hand they know now that it's not going to come as quickly as they thought; on the other, they know it is already too big for them to direct. They are now just helpers, like the rest of us. "At last the pressure's off," Jerry said.

He is disturbed, however, about what he calls the "politico pseudo-reality that we find when we go out on tour. Dig: there's a music festival, but because there are people there, radicals say it's a political festival now, not a music festival. I don't want to take over anybody's mind, but I don't want anybody else to take over anybody's mind. If a musical experience is forcibly transferred to a political plane, it no longer has the thing that made it attractive. There is something uniquely groovy about the musical experience; it is its own beginning and end. It threatens no one."

"The San Francisco energy of a few years back has become air and spread everywhere. It was the energy of becoming free and so it became free. But the political energy, the Berkeley energy, has assumed a serpentine form, become an armed, burrowing, survival thing. It's even still on the firebrand, 'To the barricades!' trip that I thought we had been through in this century and wouldn't have to will on ourselves again.

"'Accentuate the positive' though, that's my motto," he said with a gleam in his eye, "and there are more heads every day. Heads are the only people who have ever come to see us, and it used to be that if we played some places no one would come out because there weren't any heads in the town. Today there is no place without its hippies. No place."

With that Phil had come and the band had to start juggin,' playing for the people and hoping to get them high. "We realized when we started out," Jerry had said a few minutes before, "that as a group we were an invention, as new as the first chapter of a novel. We started with nothing to lose. Then suddenly there was something, but always with the agreement that we could go back to being nothing if we wanted. So nothing that has over gone down for the group has ever been real except to the fiction which could be made unreal at any time. A lot of limes when we were at that point, we consulted the I Ching, and the change we've gotten has always said push on. So we have; there's not much else we can do until the next change."

MICHAEL LYDON
(RS 66, September 17, 1970)

bad sound quality.

i thought this was exceptional considering its 37 years old

Taking the last review into consideration I downloaded this show. Great setlist, and for an aud. source the sound isn't that bad. There are aud. tapes out there that are total crap that people give 5 stars. It's a shame there is only 1 Dick's pick from 1970 with an acoustic set. From what I hear there is no soundboard from 11-08-1970, I don't know about 08-18/19-1970, if they are in the vault, it would be a great release. The acoustic sets from the 1980 Radio City, and Warfield shows are boring filler

every1 should download this--i CANnOT believe its free; first EVER Operator? first ever Brokedown?? first ever TRUCKIN!! and first ever....believe it or not--ripple!!!

I would def pay many dollars for this, and it is FREE.
....not to mention sound quality is great.


wow, just......wow.
Thanks, boys

I can't believe people are sniveling about the sound. This recording is plenty listenable especially considering that this is an audience from 1970. Perhaps people prefer pristine sounding SBD's of horrible mid 80's shows over less than perfect ( but still enjoyable to listen to )recordings of the Dead at a sweet sweet classic and creative peak( just listen to Jerry's voice ). The acoustic set is brilliant.I'll take this rare version of Operator in less than perfect sonic quality to a pristine SBD of Brents Don't Need Love or Phil's Gimme Some Lovin' ANY day.This IS the Good Ol' Grateful Dead.

Wow ! Some these early audiences are incredible,and this one is no exception.There are enough stellar audiences on this site to keep anybody happy.Also check out 9/17/70 for an early acoustic version of Box of Rain,that is not listed in deadbase ,but clearly from '70.

to all the people who are running down shows as a result of sound quality, i would like to helpfully suggest that they buy an equalizer. every show i have downloaded which has been reviewed with comments about how terrible the sound is, i have found almost always are extremely listenable and sonically enjoyable with simply lowering one or two troublesome frequencies. in the case of this show, the biggest annoyance from a sound perspective is the boominess in the tape which can be almost completely eliminated by dropping out most of the 960 hz range. that said, as far as reviewing the music content of this show, the first set is very fun and full of initial offerings of numerous classics in the making. as fun as the first set is, the second set is truly the main course of this show. the highlights for me were the hard driving cryptical/other one, the Attics which has a section of the instrumental where jerry is working the volume knob for swells which i would imagine were his tip of the hat to the great roy nichols from merle haggards band, and the man's world/not fade away which serve as a rockin' conclusion to an outstanding show

Thank You for preserving a piece of history. Anyone who knocks the sound quality of this show,should think about what they are listening to. This is a moment in time. It is both early rare acoustic Dead,and one of the first audience tapes(a tradition that is part of the Dead's mystique). Thank You taper. I hope that you get to read this.

Great acoustic set; poor sound.

This is a solid mid-1970 show. This "Man's World" is my favorite version, featuring a shreddingly bluesy jam that reaches peaks unmatched by any other (including May 2, 1970). The rest of the electric set is enjoyable but not great, and the acoustic set is very nice.

This show was the first Brokedown Palace, Ripple, Operator, and Truckin'. Sound quality is pretty bad, sounds as if someone just had a tape recorder in their pocket. But, its good to have a record of the first for so many great songs. 5 stars for historical significance, but -1 for sound.